Living in a paper house
Why do I want to do this kind of thing?
http://www.livinginpaper.com/
We looked at straw-bale house-building awhile back, but in Kansas it becomes expensive too quickly... straw-bales can't be load-bearing walls because the snow gets too heavy. But apparently Papercrete bricks can.
I keep wanting to build my own home on the cheap, using recycled/reused material. I've got woodworking experience and I'm pretty "handy" in general... I've done electrical wiring, fixed a bit of plumbing, etc. I like to learn how to do new things. And I'd really like a crack at designing a home to my specifications... I'm tired of the "box house".
'course, Papercrete isn't exactly an approved load-bearing building material here. That seems to be the sticking point in most places... they end up putting up a traditional pole-structure roof and using Papercrete (or straw-bale) as in-fill. Unlike straw-bale, you can make an entire roof out of Papercrete... apparently, there are some homes with entirely untreated Papercrete roofs that simply soak up the rain, and then evaporate it out afterwards. The Papercrete is thick enough that it never soaks all the way through. And you can use Papercrete to build domes and arches, too.
I'm >this< close to looking for a piece of land out around Newton and seeing if Harvey County building codes will let me get away with building the house I want.
BNF representation of your filtering syntax is not a substitute for human-readable documentation and examples.
I'm looking at you, Net::LDAP::Filter.
YAPC::NA 2007 – Yet Another Perl Conference
I suppose I ought to mention that I attended my first computing conference ever, Yet Another Perl Conference, North America, 2007 (YAPC::NA 2007, or yap-see for short.)
I'd never been to a computing conference, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. (I've been to a lot of week-long training sessions, which are very different.) This made me nervous... I was going in large part because my wife wanted to go, but my boss said the company would pay my way. So I was asking myself, "What am I going to get from this conference that is going to benefit my employer?"
YAPC confirmed my greatest fear... I don't know enough Perl. I learned Perl from the first-edition Llama book, which was Perl 4. I was doing tech support for an ISP, bucking for a promotion to Unix systems admin (I hate phones), and was in my second year of college (mid-twenties, having started college late). So most of my Perl was sysadmin stuff, and when Perl 5 came out, it took me awhile to switch.
I owned Programming Perl, which, as far as I can remember, was pretty much just a hard copy of the manpages. Back when Perl 5 came out, there wasn't much in the way of tutorial for the new stuff... modules, OO, references, etc. And I hit a point where I figured I'd been programming Perl for a few years, I had moved into a maintenance-phase job with little room for coding, and I just never bothered to learn much more. I never learned how to properly write a module, just why "my" was better than "local" or any of that "advanced" stuff. My wife owns nearly every O'Reilly Perl book, but I've never bothered to read them, mostly because I've always been a Unix sysadmin "utility programmer" and not a real application developer.
So this is what I took from YAPC... a real desire to learn Perl at a deeper level. I sat in talks going, "I didn't know that!" about fairly simple but non-obvious stuff. Many of the talks went over my head really quickly, though that was as much from presentation speed as not understanding the concepts. (If my boss is reading this, he's probably groaning over my deeper devotion to Perl, instead of defecting to Haskell.)
In the previous post, I talked about my trial run with O'Reilly's Safari service. And since I could read any books I wanted, I decided to start at the beginning... to work my way through the modern Llama book. (Learning Perl, for the uninitiated.)
Sure, some of it's tedious, because I "know" all this basic stuff. But I'm quickly finding that there are all kinds of little things I didn't know. I didn't know that foreach iteration variables are automatically scoped to the foreach block. I didn't know (hold on to your hats) that an array in scalar context returns the number of elements in the array... I've been using $#foo+1 all these years.
What did my employer get out of YAPC? Well, I'm dedicated to becoming a better Perl programmer, which is a plus for them. And I did learn about a lot of neat modules. And I started to make connections in the community... there was an attendee from my own city, who wants to start a Perl Mongers usergroup here, and I didn't even know he was attending.
I don't think I got a huge amount of immediate return on my investment... there wasn't much I can go back to work with and suddenly transform my job. But I think as a long-term investment, YAPC was well worth it. A year from now, I'll be a much better Perl coder, and maybe have contributed a module or two of my own to CPAN. Even if it's just in the Acme namespace. :)
I'm looking forward to YAPC::NA 2008.